Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of Hamilton. ‘Within its lyrical wit and breathtaking staging, Hamilton is deeply serious about how politics and history work.’
Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Even in a culture where publicity increasingly suffers from giganticism, the American musical Hamilton, which opened in London this month, has been massively anticipated. Now British theatre critics have confirmed the mega-hit suggested by 11 Tony awards and the five-star social media buzz from the show’s Broadway run.

Yet Hamilton seemed an unlikely theatrical triumph: a musical about Alexander Hamilton, the first US secretary of the treasury, with a score dominated by hip-hop. And, as theatre has been inching painfully towards colour-blind casting, Hamilton was provocatively contrary in making a point of casting African and Hispanic Americans as historical white males, offering an alternative history in which US citizens really were created equal.

Two of the most-revived musicals – Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof – are stories of anti-Jewish genocide

In common with most cultural super-successes, Hamilton has achieved cross-generational appeal. When I saw it in London, English teenagers in the stalls sang the score from memory while they waited for it to begin.

Within its lyrical wit and spectacular staging, Hamilton is deeply serious about how politics and history work. The standout number, The Room Where It Happens, speculating on a meeting pivotal to America’s creation, captures both the mysterious allure of politics to those fascinated by it, and the undemocratic exclusivity of power elites that currently enrages so many electorates. The lyric “not every issue can be settled by committee” might usefully be scrawled on the walls of the corridors of power everywhere. But a curious, and dubious, aspect of the acclamation for Hamilton is a recurrent implication that it is an unusually weighty example of its genre, perhaps even a musical for those who don’t like musicals.

Hamilton, though, is no aberration. It continues the American musical’s impressive tradition of creative radicalism. While Stephen Sondheim is often singled out for his unlikely subjects – presidential shootings (Assassins), US-Japanese trade wars (Pacific Overtures), pointillist art (Sunday in the Park with George) – audacious combinations of content and expression have always been integral to the genre.

Two of the most-revived musicals, Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof, are stories of anti-Jewish genocide. West Side Story turned Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into a multiracial teenage dance musical. And the last Broadway import to create anything close to the heat around Hamilton made another improbable subject – Latter Day Saints evangelism – into The Book of Mormon.

Even the most seemingly groundbreaking elements of Hamilton are ancestral. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Showboat (1927), George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), and South Pacific (1949) – by Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers – all explored racial prejudice – and gave opportunities to non-white performers – at a level that American spoken theatre took decades to match. Hamilton is not even the first unlikely political biographical musical to win the Pulitzer prize for drama. In 1960, the same trophy was given to Fiorello!, which rhythmed and rhymed the life of New York’s reforming mayor Fiorello La Guardia, his surname still immortalised as one of the city’s airports.

Some would now accuse the white authors of Showboat or Porgy and Bess of “cultural appropriation”, but the more important point is that a form often ridiculed as trivial has been consistently experimental .

Even the English market leader Andrew Lloyd Webber – a favourite punchbag for the anti-musical gang – proves the rule. Although supposedly a cosy and conservative composer, he has, with Hamilton-like audacity, written rock musicals about the crucifixion (Jesus Christ Superstar), Argentinian fascism (Evita) and the Northern Irish Troubles (The Beautiful Game). While Cats now stands as a reliable family outing, Lloyd Webber was, in 1981, widely regarded as barking for wanting to turn TS Eliot’s feline children’s verse into a dance show.

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With musicals, imaginative lunacy has consistently proved lucrative. And while Hamilton will surely become a movie – and composer-lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda could now do anything he wants with Netflix or Amazon – theatre seems to me the only performance art form that would have had the creative courage to green-light the idea in the first instance. Imagine pitching it, pre-success, to a Hollywood producer or a BBC commissioner.

Although Hamilton is now unstoppable, we should never forget how bizarre it seemed at the start. The history of the American musical offers a lesson to other media, especially broadcasting: great success is as likely to come from the pursuit of the strange as of the safe.